


My Wayward Son

by poisontaster



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, Police Brutality, Post-Series, Stealth Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-07-14
Updated: 2006-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-14 13:21:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2193342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>People who meet him now tend to think he's a little insane. They're probably right.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Wayward Son

At one point in time, Connor remembers thinking that the inhabitants of this dimension were soft. Useless.

He hasn't entirely changed his opinion on the matter, but he has had to revise it considerably.

Head meet table.

Table? Head.

Table wins, even when you're the son of two vampires and have spent most of your life in a hell dimension. He feels the skin part and leak blood at cheekbone and temple. The blood from his lip was already there and doesn't really count. His anger—always present—bubbles and froths quietly like a pool of magma. He holds onto it grimly, all that keeps him alive and moving. But he doesn't let it escape.

The thing is, he knows he could take this human, this stinking, redneck, fatbellied _cop_. He could take him and a half dozen of his buddies before they brought him down. Probably. _Probably._ But this one for sure. But he's not here for that. It would _get in the way_. And if that isn't a laugh, Connor (Stephen? Am I Stephen too?) doesn't know _what_ is.

People who meet him now tend to think he's a little insane. They're probably right. He just doesn't know how else it could be, with two lifetimes, two sets of memories set at ninety degree angles in his head. Two memories, something like three people, none of them contiguously complete, and the anger. That's the sum total of his inheritance from a man—well, vampire—he's not sure if he likes, loves, or wants to destroy.

He supposes it doesn't really matter at this point. Angel's dead.

The cop—Branaugh—pulls Connor's head back again by the hair and Connor spits and laughs. Because it's fucking _funny_ , you know?

"Oh, am I amusing you now?" Branaugh asks, breathing hard. His face and neck are flushed a dangerous red and Connor wonders what would happen to him if Branaugh stroked out right here and now. He's probably never make it out of the station alive. "Do I amuse you half as much as killing those boys? Did you think that was funny too?"

Connor had read about the boys, of course. That was brought him here in the first place, just when he thought he'd lost the trail. Back when he was in school, people had been pretty impressed when he'd told them he was going to Stanford. "You must be pretty smart," they'd said. But he clearly couldn't have been too smart, not to think that the cops would suspect him—a stranger—found nosing around the murder scene rather than the real culprit. Not a particularly good hunter, either, if he didn't smell that particular trap.

"I didn't kill anyone," he says, as he's said—calmly, flatly—every time Branaugh or his partner Frakes has asked (accused). _No one here, anyway,_ he amends, a moment behind it. _No one human. No one you would care about. Plenty of demons. My mom, if you want to be technical. And my own daughter. Who was a demon too, now that it comes to it. Tried to kill my dad once, but that didn't really work out._ He laughs again, high pitched and yeah, crazy as fuck, and he can't help it.

When he was Stephen, he never laughed. There was nothing _to_ laugh about in a hell dimension and Holtz (Father) would have only punished him for it anyway. When he was Connor Reilly he guessed he'd laughed as much as anyone. He'd never really noticed. He was more of a quiet smile kind of guy. But now? Now when he was Connor and Connor and Stephen all mixed up together? Now it all seemed sort of cosmically funny and it felt like all he could _do_ was laugh.

He thinks the word _father_ and three pictures try to cram themselves into his brain at the same time. He thinks _home_ , and there's not even one. And none of them mean a damn thing. Holtz is dead. Angel is dead. The Reilly's are dead, killed by dumb bad luck in that last battle and even if they weren't, even if they _weren't_ , they wouldn't know him anymore. Of course, he doesn't even know himself, if it comes to it. And if you couldn't laugh at that, what else was there?

"We _know_ you did it," Frakes says lazily from his slouch on the damp concrete wall, toothpick twirling between his fingers. He sound bored and calm. He's also a pusbucket liar, but Connor supposes that's par for the course. "Found you at the crime scene, didn’t we? Found your motel room, filled to the brim with that devil worship shit. This is a no brainer, kid. We just need you to tell us _why_."

"I told you." Connor looks Frakes in the eye, even through Branaugh's grip on his hair, even through the blood dripping into his left eye and turning half the room into an abbatoir. "I didn't kill anyone. I'm an innocent man." And that time, he controls the laugh. Just a little. So that it comes out a snigger instead of a full on guffaw.

Branaugh takes hold of Connor's wrist and twists it behind him; up high high high until Connor feels it creak and want to break. At the same time, he pushes Connor's head down down down into the table again, but actually with less force. The pain in his cheekbone blooms brighter anyway. "You're a ratsucked punk, if'n you ask me," Branaugh rasps.

"But an innocent one," Connor says. He marvels that the word can still be applied to him in any context. It's hot in the interrogation room and even skinny always cold ConnorConnorStephen is sweating. Branaugh would stink even without vampire senses; to Connor, the stench of him seems to coat his nose and tongue and throat, present even when he swallows and swallows and swallows. "You got nothing on me except your fat, sweaty hands."

He wonders what he's doing at all, how he'd gotten roped into all of this in the first place. It was Wesley who'd told him. About the battle, not the afterwards. In the afterwards, Wesley was dead too. He's only had it—them—in his head a short time then, still trying to be a student, a good boy, a human by day and hunting the nights away when he couldn't pretend any more. And when he'd heard, when he'd gone to Wesley and asked, he'd thought: _This. This is why. Why it all came back._

But then it was over and everyone—or close enough as to make no difference—was dead and it was Illyria who'd come to him instead. Illyria who'd told him of the things that had escaped Wolfram & Hart in the chaos; terrible things, wicked things, things that hadn't seen the light of day in millennia. And he'd gotten up and left the hospital with her then, his wounds aching and bleeding still. Her inhuman blue gaze had cowed the doctors and nurses and guards alike and no one said anything as they walked away.

But he still didn't know why. Why he did this. Why he was still doing this.

Except what else did he have to do? If not this, there was nothing. Not any more. Not Holtz, not Lawrence or Colleen Reilly, not Angel. Not a home, not friends, nothing. He was what he did, and if that was all he could be, then it had better be as good as he can make it.

"I didn't do it," he says for what he's decided is the last time. He raises his head against Branaugh's grip and feels it when the detective's wrist creaks and wants to break. He smiles at Frakes with a mouthful of bloody teeth. "Now either kick the crap out of me, lock me up, or let me go."

In the end, it's some combination of all of the above. He is battered and scabby when they let him out two days later on lack of evidence. Branaugh makes sure to be there when he's released; spits thick and phlegmy in Connor's hair and pushes him hard enough that—if he were anyone else—he would have gone sprawling. As it is, he tucks and rolls, coming to his feet and grins.

They took the last of his money, the fuckers, and even his cheap Casio watch, but Connor doesn't care. He'll manage. He always does. He sets off down the blacktop out of town, knowing that the trail here will be cold anyway. He'll have to cast around a bit before he can pick it up again. And he thinks that makes him angriest of anything.

The rumble of an engine breaks the stillness. Connor squints back down the road and sees a car, a black Impala with two silhouettes in the front seat. He sticks out his thumb.


End file.
